Powerful Music

Music is powerful.  The pairing of lyric and melody to rhythm gives music a unique power to communicate in a way that uses both intellect and heart.  Music acts as a highway connecting the mind with the heart.  Thus music has a way to communicate complex ideas and emotions in an understandable way.  Moreover, because music engages both the heart and the head simultaneously, the soul is inevitably engaged, like if you shake the flowers you're shaking the root.

Additionally, music serves distinct theological purposes for both worship and study.  The most obvious usage of music is in worship.  Throughout the Scripture, especially in Psalms, music acts as the preferred medium for praise and worship.  To be sure, music's pairing of intellect and emotion make it the perfectly tuned instrument to praise the Lord using the entire person.

God requires that we worship Him with all of our hearts, minds, and souls; it is a requirement of worship.  Music is the medium that God has designed for worship.  Certainly music is not the only mode God created for worship, however, it is one of the most effective.

Not only does music serve as a means to worship, it also is a great method for expressing complex theology in the simplest of ways.  It is for this reason that Paul exhorts believers to sing to one another in spiritual songs, hymns, and psalms (Col. 3:16).  Believers are to teach each other about the Lord.  This requires that we are talking about God and the things of God.  Certain things of God can be more than slightly complex, they can be downright difficult to understand.  Thankfully, God has given us music as a means to simplify the complex so as to make the challenging accessible.

Because of the uses and Scriptural emphasis of music as worship, the purpose of this dialogue is to encourage us to find songs that can serve these two purposes, worship and theology, in our own lives. The goal is to memorize songs that speak theology to us so that we can take ownership of the theology.  Furthermore, when we find ourselves amidst struggle, we will have songs to comfort us and to teach us the theology that we might need most in those tempest moments.  Let us then search out music that points us to God.